Eudaimonia: The Happiness the Stoics Were Talking About

The word

Eudaimonia combines eu, meaning “good” or “well”, and daimon, a kind of spirit or divine power that was thought to guide a person’s fortunes. To be eudaimon was originally to be blessed by the gods, to have good fortune.

Philosophers transformed that meaning. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their successors argued that eudaimonia depends less on luck than on how we live. Its translation as “happiness” causes confusion in English, because happiness today usually means a feeling. Eudaimonia is better understood as an assessment of a whole life: it is going well, it is worth living, it is what a human life should be.

That is why Greek philosophers could ask questions that sound strange about modern happiness. Can a person be happy while being tortured? Is someone’s happiness affected by what happens to their children after their death? These are questions about whether a life is going well, not about how it feels.

Three answers

Aristotle

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is the highest good, chosen for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else. He defines it as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and adds “in a complete life”, since one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day make a person happy.

Aristotle also thought that external goods matter. A person who is ugly, alone, childless or very poor, he says, is not likely to be fully happy, and great misfortunes like those of Priam in the Trojan war can ruin happiness. Virtue is the main ingredient, but not the only one.

Epicurus

Epicurus identified the happy life with pleasure, but not in the sense his critics assumed. Pleasure for him meant above all the absence of pain in the body (aponia) and of disturbance in the mind (ataraxia). His recommendations were simple living, friendship, withdrawal from politics and freedom from fear of the gods and of death. An Epicurean garden was far from an orgy.

The Stoics

The Stoics took the most demanding position. Since only virtue is good, only virtue is necessary for happiness, and it is also sufficient. External goods are indifferents. Health, wealth and reputation are preferred, but a virtuous person who lacks them is still happy, and a vicious person who has them all is not.

Zeno defined happiness as “a good flow of life” (euroia biou). Cleanthes and Chrysippus described it as living in agreement with nature. Later, Epictetus framed it as freedom: the happy person cannot be hindered, because they want only what is in their power.

Is virtue enough?

The Stoic claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness was controversial in antiquity and remains so. Aristotle’s followers mocked the idea that a good man on the rack could be happy. Cicero, sympathetic to the Stoics, still found the claim hard to swallow.

The Stoics had a reply. Happiness, they said, is not a feeling but a condition of the soul. The good man on the rack is in pain, which is a dispreferred indifferent, and he would choose to avoid it. But his life is not going badly in the sense that matters: he is acting with courage and integrity, and nothing can take that from him.

Whether or not you accept this, it contains a practical insight. If your sense of a good life depends entirely on circumstances, you are exposed to every reversal. If it depends mainly on how you act, you have something that holds when circumstances do not. Most people do not need to accept the strict Stoic claim to benefit from moving their center of gravity in that direction.

Eudaimonia in modern psychology

In recent decades psychologists have borrowed the ancient distinction. Research on wellbeing often separates two families of measures.

• Hedonic wellbeing: positive feelings, low negative feelings, and satisfaction with life. This is happiness in the everyday sense.
• Eudaimonic wellbeing: meaning, purpose, personal growth, autonomy, good relationships and self acceptance. Carol Ryff’s model of psychological wellbeing (1989) and Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s self determination theory are well known examples.

The two are related but not identical. People can feel good without much sense of purpose, and can experience meaning in times of difficulty. Many researchers argue that a full picture of wellbeing needs both. The ancient debate between Epicureans, Aristotelians and Stoics continues, in a different vocabulary, in academic journals.

What it means in practice

If you take eudaimonia rather than pleasant feelings as your measure, a few things change.

• Hard days can still be good days. A day spent doing something difficult and worthwhile, caring for someone, finishing something that matters, may feel bad and still count as part of a good life.
• Pleasure becomes a guest, not a goal. You can enjoy it fully without organizing your life around getting more of it. See the hedonic treadmill.
• Character becomes the long project. The question “am I living well?” turns into “am I becoming the kind of person I respect?”
• Comparison loses some power. Other people’s circumstances tell you little about whether your life is going well in this sense. See how to stop comparing yourself to others.

The Stoics would add one thing. Eudaimonia is not something you reach and keep, like a prize. It is the quality of an activity, living well, that you renew every day you live it.